agibson

Hi all Astrea Academy Trust are looking to recruit an IT Manager across our Secondary phase Academies in South Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire. The details are to be found on our Recruitment page, here Please email me if you have any questions. Andy Gibson Head of IT Astrea Academy Trust

We did it by getting the business manager to buy it on the credit card, and the store were very willing to help. I think it depends upon the store to be honest with you.

Recently bought a 75" LG TV from Richer Sounds (with the free upgrade to six years warranty) for the Headteacher's office - works brilliantly. Had to buy through the store rather than the business team to get the additional warranty, without VAT it worked out at around £600. Looking at the use of MiraCast with Windows10 and tablets to allow interactivity where needed, as we can do this with a tablet and an added WiFi NIC (which saves massively from the cost of a fully interactive screen, and allows staff the flexibility to move around the room).

Hi Has anyone found a way to set up calendar entries and reminders automated from Assignments in Teams to the Office 365 Calendar apps; we are looking at ways to remind students and teachers that something has been set. I know there is a user voice, but didn't know if anyone out there has done any wizardry with PowerApps to get this working? Thanks in advance Andy

Hi Sorry to resurrect this older thread, I am just wondering if anyone has a copy of a sample Assignments parental digest they could share (redacting any identifiable pupil information) - we are looking to adopt this but want to know what the report to parents looks like before we send them out. Thanks in advance Andy

A few things to check: 1. Permissions (as above) 2. Has there been any customisation to the OS before deployment? 3. What version of Windows 10 is it (1809/1903/1909/2004 etc) 4. Is the Solitaire Collection installed? I have had issues with all of the above in the past - try a base install of Windows 10 on a machine in your environment using a Windows 10 installation iso (no customisation) to see if that works, if it does, then maybe do an inplace upgrade on the PCs as a 'quick' fix rather than re-imaging everything? The Solitaire Collection being removed before OS deployment can break a hell of a lot of stuff, to the point where most apps will not work at all. The other thing to check is whether any GPOs are set to disable the store from running. Give me a shout if you need any other ideas, I had an absolute nightmare with it, but now I feel like I know the OS and App infrastructure very well.

As the departments have no money, and we just need to get things up and running, the allocation of who pays for it is not an issue at the minute, just enabling teaching and learning.

We are using the ones which are more like a junior school handwriting pen (v3 I believe) - we don't necessarily need the original pens, very happy with an alternative too

Hi Has anyone had any success at replacing Promethean Activpens with something cheaper? We seem to have had a few pens walk recently, and I am loathe to pay £30 for a set of two if we can get something similar to a stylus for your phone (but thinner) that will do a similar job - we only need it to be able to be used for writing on the board in the scenarios we are looking to replace them in, the right/left click functionality is not of high importance. Thanks in advance Andy

Hi all I am trying to find an answer to this, and am a bit stumped. As part of OVS-ES, does anyone have a list of the features of Azure that are available to us built into the subscription please (at no additional cost)? I am looking at the MFA/Conditional Access Rules (Known Locations), but do not think that they are available as part of our current subscription - also checking that we are getting everything we are entitled to! Thanks in advance Andy

Hi One thing that drives me up the wall with Smoothwall at the minute is the lack of hostname reporting. When I was at the Smoothwall event in Manchester there was discussion about an item on the UserVoice. If anyone else is interested in this, it is an old post, but could you vote on this UserVoice item - it would make my life much easier (and hopefully Smoothwall will implement it throughout the Reporting suite). https://smoothwall.uservoice.com/forums/145832-smoothwall-utm-swg/suggestions/17936377-safeguarding-hostname Thank you very much Andy

Hi It is the time of year that I have to sort out our OVS-ES agreement. Lovely . Anyway, I have requested prices based on our FTE for the Desktop pack, and also our student count for server CALs (as well as the server licences, sccm etc). One vendor has quoted for the student Server CALs, whereas another has come back and said that they are not required as the Desktop Pack covers this. Does anyone know of the definitive documentation/guidance that would point me in the right direction? Each of the people who have been quoting are specialists in their field, so I don't know what we need. Pulling my hair out. Andy

Have a look at the Software Update group, the deployment packages - the Scheduling may be set to a specific time which is outside of your maintenance window. Try setting it to 'As soon as possible' and see if it works? Andy

Hi PlaneHazza I have written a script that will do this...Took me a while to get my head around it, and it may not be the most efficient way of doing it, but I am still learning Powershell. If you ping me a message then I can send this over to you. Andy

One thing I would advise is to keep clear of blue LED light if you are needing to record or photograph performances. We have recently had a lot of issues with purple/blue haze on pupils when video has been taken. After a lot of research it turns out that this is related to the frequency of the blue LED light - we have had to remove blue from any LED light set up now if we are required to send a video to the examiner. We have reverted back to traditional lights. Thanks

Dear all To cut a long story short we need to replace a lot of hardware (desktops, boards, monitors, projectors etc etc) soon and don't really have the financial resources to do so all at once. Could you please tell me what you do with regard to hardware replenishment? Do you go for a lease scheme or buy it outright? Previously we have bought outright with a minimum 5yr warranty (which probably added around £30 onto the price), but have been asked to investigate what other academies and schools are doing. My gut instinct is to still continue buying but with long warranties (and higher specs) as in my mind it would work out cheaper over the life of the machine. We won't have the money to do this for a year or so, but we need to start investigating the options. Thank you in advance Andy

Hi One of our staff has handed back a Surface Pro 3 with a broken screen. Has anyone had any experience in getting these repaired (we don't have the MS Complete service warranty)? Anywhere we should try sending/taking it that doesn't charge an arm-and-a-leg? Thanks in advance! Andy

Thank you NokiX, I had tried that too, but it wasn't working either. I have bit the bullet this weekend and rolled back the VM image to how it was pre-upgrade. I have found an updated guide to get the document conversion module working for Moodle so it is happy for now...although when LTS ends for Ubuntu 14.04 I am not sure what I will do... Thanks. Andy

Thank you - I gave it a try but it didn't seem to work. I am guessing the module that Facility to Moodle is looking for within PHP is hardcoded somewhere. Does anyone use any other methods to enrol classes to courses?

Hi I don't know if anyone has any suggestions, but here is my quandary: We are currently using Moodle 3.x on an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server, with authentication by LDAP SSO and group assignments done through the Facility to Moodle module. We are using a lot of the PDF annotation for work assignments and assessment by staff using tablets to annotate straight onto the document, and it really is working well...except - we are wanting to move to Ubuntu 16.04 to take advantage of a new feature of Moodle which will allow annotation on any Office document in the same way that the PDF submission works now (this apparently will work on 14.04 but I am yet to get it working). Today I have snapshotted the server and done the upgrade, which to be fair has worked extremely well, but I have found out that Ubuntu 16.04 uses PHP7 and that no longer supports MSSQL. The Facility to Moodle module uses the MSSQL PHP extension to connect to the database (via FreeTDS) to allow us to synchronise users into class groups and therefore make it extremely straight forward to assign courses to the correct students. How do others (who are still using Moodle) do their group assignments? I do feel that the new module for annotating unconverted office documents will save a lot of time, but I do not want this to be at the expense of the time it takes to assign students to class groups. As all students are in many groups, and not taught in forms, it makes this a little more tricky than just adding their ID. I have thought about migrating to a Windows server, however it would mean that we would effectively have to have two separate Moodle servers as we use VPL (Virtual Programming Lab) for Python etc and this is not available for a Windows install. All I really want is to make life easy for staff, students and admins! Thanks in advance for any suggestions. Andy PS I don't have any budget available to purchase any synchronisation tools commercially unless they are extremely cheap (sub £100/yr).

I'd be wary, a lot of fonts are still copyrighted...

I updated Java yesterday and found the same thing. In the end I have used the Offline Installer EXE file alongside a config I have created (as per the Oracle instructions) Installing With a Configuration File I did found that it wouldn't run a silent install properly unless you used the config file on a local or mapped drive, but it did work (I've pushed out both the 32 and 64bit installers to 600 machines). Andy

I've seen this before, it isn't SCEP that is causing it to my knowledge, it was the proxy settings which are not applying until after you have loaded IE.

Hi all We have a problem with DVD playback on network computers - since recent updates to drivers/Windows we have noticed that WMP has become increasingly more temperamental with the playback of copy protected discs (I am referring to the inbuilt protection and checks). Initially we thought that it was something to do with WinVNC but this has since been removed and has made no difference. Drivers have been updated to the latest versions, machines reimaged but still no joy. We cannot use a branded dvd software, due to budget constraints, so I have been looking at freebies. VideoLan is one that I do use myself, but this has its drawbacks with the availability of record options and other items that we do not want accessible to staff and pupils - and we do not want to make things overly complex fort hem either. Does anyone out there use anything different (and free) for DVD playback - if so, could you please let me know what? Many thanks Andy

Hi We had this issue also, after a lot of trial and error the only thing we could do to make it work at a reasonable speed was to default our Win 7 machines back down to SMB1.X as per How to enable and disable SMBv1, SMBv2, and SMBv3 in Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012 - not a preferable fix, but it worked for us. Andy